The media star of this year’s round of Nobel Prizes last month has to have been Mario Capecchi, a co-winner in the medicine and physiology category. His tale of a free-thinking, American born mother’s Gestapo arrest and imprisonment at Dachau while he scrapped for existence as a small boy on the streets of Italy, and then after war’s end his rescue by her and their trip to America…well, it can’t get much better than that. Apparently, it can’t even get that good.
An Associated Press investigation by two general assignment reporters, Colleen Barry and Paul Foy, was expected to enrich his sketchy memories. It found a more prosaic but still touching tale. No Dachau, perhaps no years as a street urchin during WWII. Just fragmented memories first gathered as a frightened, tough little boy, augmented over the years by the speculations of relatives about his mother’s experience under custody (the Gestapo part may be true, and the boy’s war years certainly were fraught).
There is no sign, the story reports, that Capecchi knowingly embellished his history. It appears likely, from this account, that he told it as he thought it had been. Ordinarily, reporters who uncover inconsistencies or errors in a public figure’s bio share their findings with a certain indignant satisfaction at setting the record straight. One suspects, in this case, the mood was one of sympathy and sadness, and pain at having to break the news to the new Nobelist. We all have fond, painful, or otherwise deeply felt childhood memories. How much is true?
Thanks go to one of Barry’s and Foy’s science writing colleagues at AP for letting us know about their work.
See Also earlier post Oct. 9 Lots of Ink, not equally shared: The medicine/physiology Nobel trio ;
-CP
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